One in six Portuguese adults live in a household with food insecurity

The conclusion is of a study by the Instituto de Saúde Pública da Universidade do Porto (ISPUP), which assessed the prevalence and determinants of food insecurity in a sample of adults participating in the EPIPorto cohort. This is a population-based study, from ISPUP, which has assessed, for 20 years, the health determinants of the adult population residing in Porto.

According to Isabel Maia, first author of the research, “this study is part of my doctoral thesis, in which I want to study food insecurity throughout the life cycle. In this article, in particular, we assessed food insecurity in 604 individuals, aged 50 to 90, who were responsible or co-responsible for purchasing or making food for the household”.

The researchers analyzed the period between 2014 and early 2016, corresponding to the moment of recovery from the economic crisis that Portugal went through. “We wanted to understand if, in this time frame, middle-aged and elderly adults were at risk of food insecurity,” adds Isabel Maia.

The study concluded that one in six adults lived in a household with food insecurity, which corresponds to a prevalence of 16.6%.

The results are in line with previous data from the National Health Survey, which, in 2005/2006, assessed food insecurity in a sample of Portuguese over 18 years of age and found a prevalence of 16.5%. “Although in our study we restricted the sample to participants 50 years of age and older, we see that the value observed in our work and in the National Health Survey is very similar, which may ultimately suggest that this population was experiencing food insecurity similar to that of 2005/2006”, she says.

Women, less educated individuals, those with less skilled occupations and those who were not married (including single, divorced and widowed) were at higher risk of food insecurity. Also people who considered themselves to have an insufficient income were a vulnerable group.

These findings “show that it is necessary to focus on public health interventions targeting adults to improve their food security status”, she adds.

It should be noted that the researcher is also the author of a recently published study that assessed food insecurity in young Portuguese adults, and found that one in nine live in a household with food insecurity.

The study of food insecurity is of great relevance as it is also associated with obesity and other noncommunicable diseases such as diabetes and hypertension.

The article, published in the journal “Food and Nutrition Bulletin”, is entitled Food Insecurity in Portugal Among Middle- and Older-Aged Adults at a Time of Economic Crisis Recovery: Prevalence and Determinants. The researchers Teresa Monjardino, Brenda Frias, Helena Canhão, Jaime Cunha Branco, Raquel Lucas and Ana Cristina Santos also participated in the work, which was developed within the Epidemiology Research Unit (EPIUnit) of ISPUP.

Image: Pixabay/MabelAmber